Ancient Mesopotamia 101

Ancient Mesopotamia proved that fertile land and the knowledge to cultivate it was a fortuitous recipe for wealth and civilization. Learn how this "land between two rivers" became the birthplace of the world's first cities, advancements in math and science, and the earliest evidence of literacy and a legal system.

The story of writing, astronomy, law - the story of civilization itself - begins in one place.

Not Egypt, not Greece, not Rome… but Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamia is an exceedingly fertile plain situated between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers.

For five millennia, this small strip of land situated in what is today Iraq, Kuwait, and Syria, fostered innovations that would change the world forever.

Inhabited for nearly 12,000 years, Mesopotamia’s stable climate, rich soil, and steady supply of fresh water made it ideal for agriculture to develop and thrive.

About 6,000 years ago, seemingly overnight, some of these agricultural settlements blossomed into some of the world’s first cities.

In the period between 4000 and 3100 BCE, Mesopotamia was dotted with a constellation of competing city-states, at one point being unified under the Akkadian empire and then breaking apart again, forming the empires of Assyria and Babylon.

Despite near-constant warfare, innovation and development thrived in ancient Mesopotamia.

They built on a monumental scale, from palaces to ziggurats, mammoth temples served as ritual locations to commune with the gods.

They also developed advanced mathematics, including a base-60 system that created a 60-second minute, a 60-minute hour, and a 360-degree circular angle.

The Babylonians used their sophisticated system of mathematics to map and study the sky.

They divided one Earth year into twelve periods. Each was named after the most prominent constellations in the heavens – a tradition later adopted by the Greeks to create the zodiac.

And they divided the week into seven days, naming each after their seven gods, embodied by the seven observable planets in the sky.

But perhaps the most impactful innovation to come out of Mesopotamia is literacy.

What began as simple pictures scrawled into wet clay to keep track of goods and wealth developed into a sophisticated writing system by the year 3200 BC.

This writing system would come to be called ‘cuneiform’ in modern times and proved so flexible that, over the span of three thousand years, was be adapted for over a dozen different major languages and countless uses,

…including recording the law of the Babylonian King Hammurabi, which formed the basis for a standardised justice system.

But Mesopotamia’s success became its undoing. Babylon, in particular, proved too rich a state to resist outside envy.

In 539 BC, the Persian king Cyrus conquered Babylon, and sealed his control over the entirety of Mesopotamia.

For centuries, the area became a territory of foreign empires.

Eventually Mesopotamia would fade, like its kings, into the mists of history, and its cities and texts would sink beneath the sands of Iraq.

But its ideas would prevail in literacy, law, math, astronomy, and the gift of civilization itself.

Ancient Mesopotamia 101

Ancient Mesopotamia proved that fertile land and the knowledge to cultivate it was a fortuitous recipe for wealth and civilization. Learn how this "land between two rivers" became the birthplace of the world's first cities, advancements in math and science, and the earliest evidence of literacy and a legal system.